A Dead Body in Taos

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He ponders these questions at a desk that he shares with a framed letter from Harold Pinter, congratulating him for his 50th-anniversary revival of The Birthday Party in 2008, and a fuzzy childhood photograph of his Jewish forebears. He’s endearingly proud of both. Two guitars stand by a wall in the wood-panelled flat, high above the rumbling traffic of one of north London’s busier quarters, where he lives with his partner. A woman’s corpse is found in the New Mexico desert. Her estranged daughter comes from England to identify the body and is confronted not, as she half-anticipates, by a murder, but by a startlingly continuing existence. Her mother, Kath, had become involved with a biotech corporation that garnered individuals’ memories and archival photographs to create cyborgs. She has left all her money (bitcoin, presumably) to the institute and taken advantage of the facilities to become a digital version of herself. Will robomum and her daughter be able at last to bond? A Dead Body In Taos is a challenging work that gives us plenty to ponder. The broad historical panorama drawn by Farr would perhaps be better served by a more expansive art form like TV. Those unaware of the Kent State shootings - arguably akin in epochal terms to the poll tax riots here, South Africa's Sharpeville massacre or the Tiananmen Square protests in China - will not appreciate the social and political impact that Farr references, an impact which may yet be felt by Vladimir Putin's Russia after his draft for the war in Ukraine. A Dead Body in Taos barely discusses the ethics of life through AI, nor thoroughly interrogates the relationship between mother and daughter. Instead it spends considerably more time on 1970s Vietnam and the activism that the younger Kath had as a driving force in her life. We briefly meet Leo ( David Burnett) during the funeral and are shown his meeting with her and the importance he would play in the remaining decades of her life. Burnett is particularly impressive when showing the ageing of his character from a college-goer to a man in his late 60s, with subtle but impressive shifts in body language and posture. The two men summon scenes from the postwar left: Paul Robeson, Aldermaston marches, women called Muriel, admirable Quakers

Sam, played by Gemma Lawrence, has flown in from London to identify the body of her mother, Kath, from whom she has been estranged for three years. The major complication comes when Kath’s will is explained: Sam gets nothing, it all goes to the sinister Future Life Corporation. When Sam goes to investigate she finds the ultimate in glossy American lifestyle salesmanship offering ‘to take humanity into the third millennium.’ Future Life offers nothing less than an end to death. Her mother Kath is only literally dead, she is virtually alive. Notably strong on the technical front but with a story that needs a little more work to be excellent.Rachel is an award-winning stage director and recipient of the National Theatre Peter Hall Bursary for 2023/24. It has just been announced that she will be the next Artistic Director of Unicorn Theatre, after being Associate Director since 2018. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Farr’s drama, in part inspired by Adam Curtis’s documentaries, is ingeniously multifocused, though not fully energised as intellectual inquiry or emotional investigation. Rachel Bagshaw’s staging – for Fuel, the non-fossilised, ever-burning-bright production company – is exemplary. I love telling stories, sometimes through directing.” David Farr. Photograph: Manuel Vazquez/The Guardian

A body has been found in the desert outside Taos, New Mexico. It is identified, cremated and the ashes scattered. But is the person who inhabited it really dead? There are some brilliant ideas here, and powerful themes: bereavement, AI, student protest, vacuous advertising, corporate encroachment and mother- daughter conflict, but in the end the play never fully hangs together. It never really comes to life, it is always less than the sum of its parts Crucially, Eve Ponsonby gives a compelling central performance as insufficient mother and avatar; all in white, pale faced, hair unleashed; part Isadora Duncan, part Florence of the machine. Her digital incarnation is the last of many reinventions: she is seen as discontented daughter, innovative painter, Esalen follower and student activist – present at Kent State University in the 70s when students protesting against the escalation of the Vietnam war were shot by national guardsmen. The best argument against digital enhancement is the ability of human beings to generate their own change. It is an argument an actor makes every time she steps on stage. It is surprising how much the play glosses over Kath’s accumulation of wealth, which is what leaves her able to afford this AI program. Presumably it is from a successful career in advertising but it seems like a fairly significant and particularly relevant point to leave unclarified, especially as it is such a contrast to everything else we learn about her.Kath Horvath is found dead in the New Mexico desert. With her body is a message for her estranged daughter Sam: It could be confusing. But Farr’s script is expertly plotted and paced, and Rachel Bagshaw’s staging is brilliantly lucid, delivering the kind of seamlessly tech-heavy production that producer Fuel excels at. Designer Ti Green fills the stage with an ingenious assemblage of screens that sit surprisingly naturally amid the crumbling splendour of Wilton's Music Hall. They display subtitles (in a welcome move towards inclusivity) as well as projections that shift the scene from desert to stark facility. One of his college contemporaries was the actor Rachel Weisz – “a highly confident, very clever, albeit quite complicated north London girl, from a very intellectual Jewish family”. Together they started making “these extraordinarily weird plays, which we’re still very proud of, actually”. They set up a theatre company, Talking Tongues, and won a Guardian student drama award at the Edinburgh fringe. Farr emerged from university with a double first and was given his first professional directing job by Stephen Daldry at the Gate theatre in London. At 32, he became artistic director at Bristol Old Vic, followed by four years running the Lyric Hammersmith and a stint as an associate director at the RSC.